ApexSQL Clean: Impact Analysis and Graphical Dependency Viewer tool

Dependency Analysis Wizard

Well, step by step, the first thing you do is to create a new "Dependency Analysis Project". This invokes the Dependency Analysis Wizard, at which I will have a closer look now:

You can also use the wizard to edit the current project settings and/or restore previously used setting or open another already existing project. Since this is the first time I use the software, I obviously need to create a new project.

The above page of the wizard is not new to anyone working with SQL Server. It's the typical login screen, where you specify your login credentials.

Sometimes it can happen that a database is not its self-contained universe, but rather has references to other databases. If that is the case, ApexSQL Clean allows you to add such references to other databases residing on the same SQL Server instance, as the above picture shows. All checked databases will be included in the analysis. It should be noted, that the feature to include external databases allow you not only to search for child references, but also for parent references as well. This is quite remarkable as it allows you to deal with situations where, for example, a database gets loaded regularly from some other staging database or where you use some other database for report, auditing or archiving purposes.

This page here at hand allows you to specify comment tokens in source code files of client applications that will be ignored from analysis. Typically you would add here the comment tokens of the client language you use, such as VB, C#, or C++. Single line tokens are as well supported as multi-line comment tokens.